40 TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY REPORT. 
some of-our Eastern farms have changed from corn and wheat to 
hay and if they have not prospered under this change, then it fol- 
lows that they have not yet found their proper adaptation. It is 
not at all strange that this adaptation is lacking, since there has 
been no means of putting the farmer into touch with his own 
problem. Not one of the older farmers before me was adapted to 
his environment by the church or the school or by any other edu- 
cational or social agency. If he is now adapted to the conditions 
in which he lives, it is because of some accident of heredity or 
circumstance. We can never adapt the business of the farm to its 
conditions until we understand thoroughly all the problems involved, 
and there has been no serious effort to understand these particular 
problems until within very recent time. 
Much has been said about the disadvantage of the Eastern farms 
in competing with the Western farms. I am convinced that they 
often suffer quite as much by competing with each other or with 
regions close at hand. I recently took a thirty-mile drive, in the 
course of which I traveled a flat country where oats were a good 
crop and harvested by machinery and drawn from the fields in 
high-piled racks ; on the same day I climbed a country of high and 
steep hills in which oats were a poor crop and not harvested by 
machinery and were hauled from the declivities in small loads. It 
was evident that the latter region could not compete in the raising 
of oats with the former, although they were less than twenty miles 
apart. The one region seemed to be well adapted to oats and the 
other, at least on the hillsides, was not a profitable oat country. In 
other words, the farmers on the hills had not adapted their farming 
to the hills. I suspect that a bushel of oats cost them at least 50 
per ct. more than it cost the man at the other end of the county. 
Yet, I think that there is a way of ‘profitably farming those hills; 
many men have proved it. 
THE REMEDIES. 
While I am convinced that the general condition of New York 
agriculture is prosperous and hopeful, we all know that there are 
very great problems before us and that some regions are much 
more disadvantaged than others. If we are to discuss remedies we 
must first of all establish a point of view. 
We must first disabuse our minds of all prejudgments and con- 
sider the conditions as they actually exist and in their relations to 
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